How to Start a Search Engine Marketing Agency from Scratch

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is an extremely popular form of online marketing these days. Thanks to SEM’s popularity, an SEM marketing agency has a high-profit potential. If you have a good sense of how SEM works, you could be one of the lucky people to take advantage of this high demand.

SEM Agencies are abundant already, but many are corrupt and cause issues in the long-run. Others are simply run by people who don’t have the conviction and ambition to stick with it long enough.

Keep Your Day Job

An SEM Agency isn’t something that’s going to be successful overnight. Even if you’re good at running one, you probably won’t see much if any profits for the first few months. (Perhaps longer) The initial goal of your agency will be to build up a strong reputation, so that in the future people will feel safe working with you.

The point is, you won’t be able to make a living with your agency for quite some time. You’ll still need a means of supporting yourself and your family in the meantime. There will be a point once you start gaining a reputation where you could leave your day job and work solely with your agency, but it is best to have that fallback until such time as this is the case.

Choose Your Specialization and Target Market

A successful agency is a specific agency, especially when it comes to SEM. You can’t simply offer SEM packages for any and all websites under the sun! You need to refine your agency based on your own skillset. For example, if you have experience building up blog sites, then that could be your specialization.

Your target market would be people looking to further their blog site’s potential with SEM. Many people think that refining your market decreases the number of clients you can reach. While this is true, the point is that you provide excellent services to your target market rather than mediocre services to everyone that every other agency can also offer!

Focus on Return Clients

Clients that appreciate your work and wish to continue working with you are the best kind. Any agency can perform a random job for a random client and never hear from them again. Getting consistent work from a particular client and becoming their exclusive SEM Agency benefits you far more than any other client could.

For one, it provides you with a steady flow of profit. While most agencies rely on profit obtained on and off when clients are around, you would be able to know that you’ll gain a certain amount consistently.

On top of that, return clients may recommend your agency to like-minded clients. These like-minded clients have a high chance of turning into return clients as well.